Powerful prose stored in error-free DNA

18:00 23 January 2013

Douglas Heaven, reporter

(Image: Francis Miller/Time & Life Pictures/Getty)

It is one of the most iconic speeches of all time, and now it has been immortalised in a very unusual way. A snippet of Martin Luther King's 1963 "I have a dream" speech has been stored in the alphabet of DNA.

Nick Goldman at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, UK, and colleagues synthesised DNA to encode an eclectic mix of information in its adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine components. They used these "letters" to record an audio file of 26 seconds of King's speech, all 154 of Shakespeare's sonnets, a digital photo of their laboratory and the famous paper in which James Watson and Francis Crick first described the double-helical structure of DNA.

The team built on previous DNA-encoding techniques by adding error correction, allowing content to be retrieved with 100 per cent accuracy.

DNA-based memory is sought after because DNA can last for thousands of years without special storage, other than being somewhere cold, dark and dry. In theory, DNA can encode roughly the capacity of 100 billion DVDs per gram of single-stranded DNA, making it potentially useful for storing the vast amounts of archived data produced by places such as CERN.

Was teh reason for teh intermediate conversion step to trinary used because it implemented a more efficint error correction procedure, or merely because, although less effiicient, as in being a different base, that it was patentable?

As for the divide into chunks, cross check etc, how is this handled with the equivalent open source bit torrent encoding, especially if the general bit torrent style of data handling is restricted in future?